Finding Aletheia
by storybookpen
Summary: Spoilers for 1x10, Anslo Garrick Part 2. When Liz's father comes for her, she loses herself. It takes a long time, and Raymond Reddington, to find herself again. Liz/Red


Disclaimer: I don't own _The Blacklist_.

* * *

"Are you my father?" she says.

His pause is long, almost interminable. His answer: "No." She doesn't know if she's relieved or disappointed to hear it.

Liz doesn't see or speak to Raymond Reddington again for six months.

* * *

Red has been gone for two months by the time Liz realizes she can't take it any more. She doesn't trust Tom. Doesn't even know him, apparently. Every moment she is with him is spent wondering not _whether_ he will someday betray her, but _how_. It could be a bullet as easily as it could be an affair.

"Tom," she says one day, halting him in the midst of another painful when-are-we-going-to-finalize-that-adoption speech. "I need some time. Time without you."

She knows Red has manipulated her emotions towards her husband, no doubt for some nefarious reason of his own. She also knows that Red would sacrifice his life for hers.

"If that's what you really want," Tom says, his voice cracking.

Two days later she is taken. She never returns to the FBI.

* * *

Red has been gone for three months by the time Liz stops fighting her captors. She is strong, stronger than she knows, and so for a month she endures their tortures and their mind games and their taunts. She does not endure gracefully-she screams and weeps and ultimately begs-but she endures.

"I must say, I really am impressed," Hans Landa tells her, wiping his bloody fingers with a handkerchief. "You have no family. Your husband betrayed you. Your coworkers gave you up for dead within days of your disappearance and, frankly, didn't seem all that disturbed when you went missing. What is it that keeps you fighting? You have no one. Nothing."

_She has me_, Liz hears, but only in her head. She's been clinging to that voice for a month now, holding on to its empty promises of protection. For this long, terrible month she has had faith. She feels it going now.

Hans, whose blacklist name if he had one would be the Remodeler because of his knack for reducing a person to nothing and creating a new being within that person's skin, somehow senses the shift that happens behind her eyes. He smiles and slips her an injection that will make it impossible to sleep for the next twenty-four hours. She knows, because she's experienced it too many times before.

"There, there, little girl," Hans says, patting her hand as liquid fire surges through her veins and her screams begin again. "The worst has passed. Your father will be so pleased."

* * *

Raymond Reddington, the Concierge of Crime, has been on the run from the FBI for four months by the time Beth Gellar's father reenters her life.

Lionel Gellar is a coldly handsome man. Elegant and always well-dressed. The first time he sees his daughter in over two decades, he cups her face with his hand and smiles to show that he is pleased when she does not weep.

"I have missed you, my daughter," Gellar says, his sharp eyes taking in every detail of her face. There is a faint knife scar under her right eye, and her lip was split during the morning's training session. "Reddington will pay dearly for taking you from me."

Beth's memories are ephemeral. Dr. Landa has told her the cause is years of sustained abuse. She believes him; she has the scars to prove it. She can recall nothing of her childhood. Of her adult life she remembers only a voice, whispering promises in her ear. False promises. And she remembers pain.

"I always get what I want, Beth," her father tells her. "Despite Reddington's efforts, you've found your way to me. With you at my side, there's nothing I can't do."

He hands her a Glock. She thumbs off the safety.

* * *

Five months after escaping Reddington's clutches, Beth-whose blacklist name, if she had one, would be the Huntress-captures one of Reddington's known associates, Dembe.

He is astonished to see her and does not appear to notice the gun she has pointed at his face. "You are alive," he says, smiling. "Raymond will be overjoyed."

His words are lies, of course. Reddington knows she's alive. He's been hunting her this past month just as she's been hunting him. Her father's men have already blocked three attempts on her life.

"Where is Reddington?" she says, her voice emotionless. Her hand, holding the gun, does not shake.

"He is safe." Dembe's eyes narrow. "Let me go and I will bring him to you."

She shoots him in the leg, careful to avoid his femoral artery and the fragile cartilage of his kneecap. He grunts and falls to the floor, clutching the wound.

"Don't play games with me," she hisses. "Tell me where Reddington is or my next shot does permanent damage."

"Something has happened to you," Dembe gasps, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. "You know me. You know Raymond. You know we are on your side."

She snarls like a wild thing and drops to her knees beside him, her gun at his throat. "No one is on my side. I'm on my father's side. He's all that matters. That's why Reddington stole me from him all those years ago."

"Raymond took you from Gellar because Gellar hurt you when you were a child," Dembe says, articulate despite his pain. "He didn't keep you. He gave you to Sam. Don't you remember Sam?"

_Love you, Butterball._ She doesn't know that voice, though it resonates down to her soul.

"I don't know any Sam," she says weakly.

"Raymond has always protected you. He loves you."

Her expression hardens. "No one loves me," she says, and pulls the trigger again.

* * *

Six months after Reddington vanished from everyone's radar, Beth finds him standing in an empty plot in a suburban neighborhood that has seen better days.

"How did you find me?" he asks casually, not turning to face her as she walks up behind him.

He is smaller, somehow, than she expected, though he is not a small man. A little younger than her father. Handsome. The sight of him does not fill her with fear as Dr. Landa warned her it might. He looks tired, and pleased to see her.

"You meant for me to find you." Her gun hangs by her side. Her father, if he were here, would be disappointed she didn't shoot Reddington while his back was turned. She doesn't want to shoot him just yet, though. First she has to try to understand. "How's Dembe?"

He smiles. "Nearly recovered. Relieved to have all his limbs intact. It was kind of you not to kill him."

She shrugs. "I needed him to tell you about our encounter. A dead body would have delivered the same message, but I prefer not to leave a mess."

Reddington studies her for a long moment. She wonders what he's looking for in her expression. Fear? She hasn't been afraid since she woke from what felt like a two decade slumber. Anger? Hatred? She should feel those things, knowing what this man did to her, and yet standing before him now, with no memory of ever having been harmed by him, those emotions are as distant as the Nile.

Whatever he's looking for, he seems to find it. "I've missed you, Lizzy," he says.

"No one calls me that."

He cocks his head. "I do. Your husband used to."

"I've never been married."

He laughs. "While I used to wish that was the case, you certainly were. His name was Tom Keen." He reaches very slowly into his pocket-no sudden movements-and extracts a picture. He holds it out to her.

She shouldn't take it. She should end Reddington's life right now and bring his head back to her father as proof that she's earned her place as his right hand.

She takes the picture. It shows a man, a dog, and a woman who looks very much like Beth.

"This isn't me," she says.

"You know it is."

The woman in the picture could be her, the same way a handsome man on the street might someday be a starving veteran. This other Beth looks years happier, eons more at peace. She is unscarred. This is not the picture of a woman suffering from systematic abuse.

She turns her gaze to the others in the picture. The man does not inspire any recognition. The dog, on the other hand...

"Hudson," she breathes.

Reddington, for the first time since she arrived, looks nonplussed. "The dog?"

She barely hears him. She remembers Hudson. She remembers his fur beneath her hands. Remembers waking to the swipe of his tongue across her cheek. She even remembers finding herself standing in a pool of his pee. She remembers Hudson. She loved that dog, and he loved her. Unconditionally.

"Where is he?" she demands, her voice rough.

Reddington's brow furrows. "I believe Agent Ressler took him in after your supposed death."

That name is utterly unfamiliar to her. Reddington reads the lack of recognition in her face and nods as if making a note to himself. "So you don't remember Donald. No great loss there, I'll admit. What about Cooper? No? Meera? How about Aram?"

That name. That name means something to her. _I've only shot at paper targets._

"You remember Aram! Excellent. Not as far gone as your father thinks you are, are you?"

"My father saved me from you," Beth spits. This is her absolute truth.

"Your father is a monster," Reddington retorts. "Don't get me wrong, I'm one myself, but I have standards. On rare occasions I care about people other than myself. Do you remember the Stewmaker?"

She shudders. That name does spark fear in her, in the instant it takes to control herself again. "He...hurt me," she remembers, though the details are beyond her reach.

"Yes. And I ensured he would never hurt anyone again."

Reddington moves as if to touch her chin. She flinches away. For all that his gaze is steady, he is clearly unhappy with her reaction.

"Lizzy, what do you remember about me?"

His face, behind a pane of glass covered in blood. A hand holding hers tightly enough to make the world stop spinning. _I have you._

"I don't remember you," she says.

Now he does catch her chin in his grip, allowing him to look her in the eye. "There was a king with a mighty palace," he says. "The king was strong and had many subjects. He also possessed the most beautiful and rarest treasure in all the lands. But the king did not understand the treasure. It did not fit his idea of beauty. He was cruel to it. He sought to force it into a shape for which it was unsuited."

Reddington's grip on her chin is firm but not painful. His eyes are mesmerizing.

"One of the king's knights saw what the king was doing to the treasure and knew it to be wrong. One day he stole the treasure away. He knew the king would hunt him, knew that he himself was unsuitable for protecting the treasure, and so he took the treasure to a simple carpenter, a good man. 'Protect it as if it were your own,' the knight told the carpenter. For years, the carpenter watched over the treasure, and with time it refined itself and became more lovely than ever before. One day the carpenter became ill. He knew he could no longer keep the treasure safe. He sent four pigeons, one to each corner of the kingdom, all carrying the same message for the knight: 'Protect the treasure.' The knight, who was no longer a knight, received the message and did as the carpenter had asked. He found the treasure and he watched over it. He loved it, until the day the king's men came for the treasure when the knight was out slaying a dragon. The king's men stole the treasure, leaving behind only shards of gold and diamonds. And the knight despaired, for he knew he had failed the only task that would ever matter to him."

Beth trembles. "Red," she says, experimentally.

"Yes."

"I had a dog," she says. Her tongue feels clumsy and unfamiliar in her mouth.

"Yes."

"You were...my friend."

"I was, and I am."

"My father...he hurt me. A long time ago. And more recently."

"Yes, sweetheart." Red draws her into his arms. "I'm sorry to say that he did."

_Are you my father?_

_No._

"It would have been easier for us all if you had been my father," she says, very quietly.

His cheek presses against her hair. "I failed my own daughter. I've never thought of you as my child, Lizzy."

There are tears on her cheeks. "And yet you've helped me. Even now, even knowing I came here to kill you."

"You are more precious to me than you will ever know."

She pulls back to look him in the eye again, testing his sincerity. There's no deceit there, at least none that she can detect. "Can you help me remember other things?" she asks. "I'd like to remember Sam. My life. You."

Red leans in and presses his lips to hers. The kiss is chaste, gentle. His lips are soft and warm. Thanks to whatever her father did to her, it is the first kiss she can remember having. She likes it rather a lot.

Red ends the kiss, eventually, and scrutinizes her face once more. "It was worth a shot," he says wryly. "In answer to your question, I will do whatever it takes to help you regain what you've lost, and I have deep pockets and access to the best doctors in the world." He loops his arm in hers, escorting her in the direction of his car.

"I want my dog," she says.

"I'll take care of it."

It is difficult to broach the most important subject: "What about my father?"

He stops and there is fire in his eyes. "I promised myself, long ago, that I would burn the world for you if it became necessary. I'll start with your father."

This time she initiates the kiss and it is not so chaste. He clutches her, fiercely, as if her presence comforts him as much as his comforts her.

"I trust you," she tells him, and though she can't remember much she is certain this is the first time she has ever uttered those words.

He leans his forehead against hers. His thumb traces the knife scar under her eye. "My dear, you and I have a truly exceptional future ahead of us."

As usual, he is correct.


End file.
